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W E L C O M E T O
T O R T I L L A B A Y . C O M
T
H E W E B S I T E O F
A L B E R T O
V A Z Q U E Z A N D C R A I G
A Y L I F F E
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Canal, Venice
2006 |
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N O R T H E R N
I T A L Y B L O G
V E N I C E
...A Little
Song, A Little Dance, A Little Seltzer Down the Pants.....
Things don't always go the way
you plan them. And coordinating schedules with other travelers can be
daunting. .....
We left Barcelona on April 30th,
Sunday night in the overnighter to Milan. It was an Italian train, so it
was overbooked and overcrowded, but we ended up with a large private
sleeper compartment. On Monday morning , we arrived in Milan, then took
another train to Venice; we were one day in advance of my mother's
arrival. My mother and cousin Vicki were arriving from Dallas (to New
York to Zurich and Zurich to Venice). It was a dream of a lifetime for
them both, and they had one week to travel with us and tour Italy.
We spent the first day getting
from the Milan train station to the Venice train station (The Lido) to
the vaporetto to our room 2 blocks from St. Marks Square. (A
vaporetto is a water taxi. There are no cars in Venice and everything is
transported up and down the Grand Canal by boat - laundry, spaghetti,
crackers, wine, souvenirs, garbage, building materials, and people.
Everything. The Grand Canal is filled with careening service barges,
vaporettos, tourists in gondolas, and private motorboats.)
It is an astonishing thing to walk
directly out of the Venice train station exit at the back, walk down the
broad steps to the edge of the water and be gobsmacked instantly by 13th
century palaces and villas on water canals directly in front of you. It
was like tumbling down a rabbit hole or falling into a rip in the
space-time continuum. There was a swarm of people coming and going about
their business and getting in and out of water taxis. I felt my head
start to spin a little bit.
We took a deep breath, made our
way to the numero 51 dock, to the crowded water taxi,
bought our billetti and jumped on, praying that we were on the
right boat. The trip to the little hotel we rented lay at the end of the
serpentine Grand Canal that snakes through the main groups of islands of
Venice. It was breathtakingly beautiful, as we passed magnificent
palazzos and churches, fish markets and gondoliers.
The Grand Canal is
lined with extraordinary private homes though some had turned into
hotels and casinos or restaurants, in colors of terra cotta or
pastel shades of ochre and rose and mint and ivory with private docks
and filigreed balconies. The façades and roof cornices had ornate
calabans, statuary, elaborate grillwork and gargoyles.
The docks had the
beautiful red and white striped poles we have all seen in books and
films. But who knew they came in a variety of colors? Blue and white
poles with gold caps, pink and yellow striped
poles with red caps and so
on....
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Cornice,
Venice 2006 |
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Venice 2006 |
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Alberto, Venice 2006 |
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Grand Canal, Venice
2006
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-CONTINUED-
We passed under the famous Rialto
Bridge, stopping at several docks and quays along the way to let people
on and off. We arrived at our stop and made our way to our little hotel,
Albergo Doni on Calle Vin. It was only about 500 meters from the
dock, over a small bridge and down a little alley which opened
into a beautiful canal:
The light was profoundly luminous.
The day was fading now, and there seemed to be a kind of suspension of
golden blue mist in the air.
Alberto had been commenting on the
sky and how much it looked just like the skies we had seen in the
beautiful Titians and Caravaggio's and other paintings we had seen on
our trip. And it was true, the clouds in the deep blue sky looked
as if they were stolen from a Tintoretto or a painting by Rafael; copper
and gold tinged and pink and yes, green - a kind of resurrection of renaissance
color lifted from a massive canvas. It wouldn't have surprised us to see
a host of angels with gold trumpets or an ascending flight of pink cherubim
floating nearby; the gold horizons fading
into deep blue. The light somehow intensified the colors of the buildings,
brightening the color palette, and turned the water and it's sloshing silvery shadows
into mauve and maroon.
I remembered what Mary McCarthy
wrote about ' the unique twinning' in Venice,.... " Nothing exists (in
Venice) that does not have it's counterpoint; the city itself exists
twice over-in its solid weight and in its reflections...like the
tremulous shining light on my bedroom ceiling that sometimes gives me
the odd sensation of swimming in air."
I am reading a marvelous
collection of essays about Italy in a book called "Italian Days" by
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. In the chapter on Venice, she quotes Oscar
Wilde who said after taking a gondola ride, "I feel like I've been
through a sewer in a coffin."
And it well may be true ; Venice
is in a suspended state of permanent decay. The odiferous canals, the
lap marks of old tidewater against the rotting foundations. The smell of
garlic and broiled fish and damp, dank stones.
"A city of masks and
mirrors", writes Harrison. "...too many shadows. A city preserved in
aspic, left over from a dinner party.
And all the guests are dead."
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Albergo
Doni Hotel 2006 |
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Venice 2006
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-continued-
The streets are filled with
tourists and shops
selling Murano glass and Carnivale masks from Mardi Gras. Every step,
every turn brings you to a tiny piazza and a fairytale bridge and narrow
alleys filled with balconies of potted geraniums and drying laundry,
leading to more bridges and piazzas and alleys.
The city itself is
nothing if not bridges, because it was built on mounds of dredged sea
bottom, each fragile house and palace built on tree trunks pounded into
the soil and preserved forever from rot by the seawater that holds them.
We crossed the Rialto Bridge and enjoyed the view of crowds of visitors
happily eating dinner or photographing their mates.
We crossed the entire main island
to the other side and stumbled into the ancient open air fish market on the edge of the canal, closed for the day,
scrubbed clean and everything put away.
I noticed that every graceful
pillar that supported the wood and tile roof was made of marble and
every pillar had a different theme that capped the pillar where it met
the roof supports. Amazing. This one had dancing water nymphs, the next
a circle of dolphins and seahorses. The next, a relief of fishing boats,
the next a group of frog-faced water sprites. The drain spouts from the
roof were elegant eels and barracudas made of green copper.
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Top of St.
Mark's Basilica, Venice 2006 |
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Copper barracuda drain, Venice
2006
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Column detail from
The Fish market, Venice 2006
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-continued-
And this is to me, the best thing
to love about Venice. An entire city dedicated to Art and Beauty.
If you
stop looking at t-shirts and postcards and glassware and focus on any
other part of the city, even if it only one square meter in front of
you, and let everything else fade away, you will see great and beautiful
things in the tiniest details. This is a beautiful place.
Perhaps Venice is the most beautiful place in the world. It says to me, there is
nothing more important than Art and living your life immersed in beauty.
We must save this place forever.
Let's make this place a bridge to the
highest ideals inside each of us.
Let's never forget that if you have
only two dollars, spend one dollar on dinner and buy flowers with the
rest.
I felt hopeful and uplifted by the message Venice gave to
me. I hope you will too.
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click to play
V e n i c e , I t a l y
M a y , 2 0 0 6
Music: Canto Della Terra sung by
Andrea Bocelli
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Lunch, Venice 2006
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-continued-
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We
had an early dinner and wandered
about till we were too exhausted to
walk. The next morning we prepared
to meet Mom and Vicki at the
airport. At 8 a.m. I checked my cell
phone and found an ominous message.
"The plane was 4 hours late leaving
Dallas. We are connecting in Zurich
but we will be late. Do not meet us
at the airport until we call you
from Zurich."
But
the phone call didn't come. I
carried the phone in my hand all day
until around 4 p.m. and we decided
to go into St. Mark's Basilica
before it closed. We were at the top
of the dome admiring the famous
bronze horses when I got the call
from Vicki. " Craig, your mother
tripped and fell at the airport. She
is okay but she knocked out her
front tooth and her lip is badly
swollen. She didn't break any bones.
We are at the hotel 20 miles away.
We couldn't reach you on your cell
so we came to the hotel we
reserved."
Alberto had already suggested that
we rent a room for them at our hotel
to save time and rescue what was
left of the day. I convinced them to
get out of the remote landlocked
hotel, get on a water taxi and come
to Venice to spend the night. They
arrived after sunset, hungry and
disoriented. I knew we had to leave
in the morning to make our train to
Milan, so we took them to dinner, a
short walk to the Square and sent
them to bed. We had already arranged
to be with them in the same hotels
that they booked in Milan and
Florence. I am apprehensive.
The
next morning we left for
Milan. |
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Ouch! Mom knocks
out a tooth
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